James Sallis - Black Hornet

The police didn’t think either the FBI or Treasury Agents could find their own asses, mind you.

Walsh dropped a slab of rib back on the platter. It looked like piranha had stripped it clean to the bone. He pulled a paper napkin off the stack of them delivered with the ribs and wiped mouth, chin, fingers.

“These guys in the hats,” he said. “They potential heroes? Kind that might take things into their own hands?”

“I don’t get that feeling, no.”

“Good. Enough vigilantes running around already. So how far are these guys bent?”

“Hard to say. The gleam’s there in their eyes, no doubt about that. But you can still see around it. So can they.”

“For now, anyway.” Walsh killed his first beer and put the bottle down. It was smeared with barbeque sauce. “Dangerous?”

“I don’t think so. Could be to themselves, given the right circumstances.”

“Or the wrong ones.”

I nodded.

Then we both concentrated on our ribs and no one said anything more for a while. Just lots of animal noises, as LaVerne would put it.

John Gaunt went behind the counter for another beer and glanced over to see if perhaps we might be in need as well. Walsh stuck up a couple of fingers. What the hell. He had three days off. And I’d had a rough week. Not to mention feet resembling hamburger.

“Still no connection between these guys and the shooter, way you see it? Or this Yoruba thing?”

“Other than the fact there’s no one here but us chickens, you mean. Not that I can make out.”

“So why hasn’t he stepped forward again? Man seemed awful damn determined. You know? But it’s been a long time now since the last killing.”

“Could be his knowing you’re back here behind him has a lot to do with it. Having to watch over his shoulder.”

I set my empty bottle alongside his. John Gaunt thumped new ones, held between first and second fingers, onto the table and snagged the empties between third and fourth fingers, all in a single sweep.

“This isn’t some repressed accountant or crazed cabdriver who one night watched a TV show that shook him loose from his moorings then grabbed his old man’s gun from the closet and headed off to restore justice to the world. This guy’s no wig-out. Not a Quixote, either.

“Or maybe,” I said, “come to think of it, he is. But whatever else he is, the man’s a soldier.

“Think about it. He’s behind enemy lines. Hell, he lives in enemy territory. There’s nothing he can take for granted-nothing. Nothing’s safe. He can’t trust the people he comes across. Can’t trust the language, can’t trust the water, can’t even trust whatever new orders might reach him. Now someone, another soldier, is crowding up close behind him. The enemy knows he’s here. The enemy’s seen him. What else can he do-”

“-but become invisible?”

“Exactly.”

“And wait.”

“Exactly.”

But we didn’t wait long.

“Regardez, ” Alphee said.

John Gaunt walked over to turn up the TV’s sound. Our eyes went with him.

A street scene. Block-long stretch of low Creole cottages fanning out behind, downtown New Orleans looming in the distance, lots of open sky. Reporter in tailored suit and silk blouse holding mike. Full lips, good teeth, golden eyes. Sound of traffic close by.

Just moments ago, in what was believed may have been the latest in a series of terrorist-style killings, a resident in cardiology at Charity Hospital was gunned down in the parking lot of this convenience store near the river.

The camera pulls away to show a stretcher being fed into an ambulance. All around the ambulance are police cars with headlights aglare, bubblelights sweeping.

Coming off forty-eight straight hours on call, much of it spent at the front lines of a battlefield most of us couldn’t even imagine-gunshot wounds, knifings, drug overdoses, a man who fell asleep on the tracks and was run over by a train-Dr. Lalee had told coworkers she planned to stop off for coffee, half ’n’ half and frozen pizza on the way home, then spend the next two days in bed with several good books of resolutely nonmedical sort.

A single bullet-fired, officials believed, from an abandoned factory nearby-ended those plans. Ended all this physician’s plans. And ended, as well, a young woman’s life. A fine young woman who against her parents’ wishes relocated here from Palestine. Who had chosen New Orleans as the place where she would serve her final years of medical apprenticeship. Where she would become a part of the team working to provide our community a level of medical care elsewhere unsurpassed.

Now, even as we watch from our living rooms, other members of that team worked frantically to save Dr. Lalee’s life. One of their own.

This, just in from Charity Hospital.

The camera pulls back to the announcer’s face.

Chief of staff Dr. Morris Petrovich has announced that, at 4:56 local time, despite heroic measures on the part of physicians and staff, Dr. Lalee, a resident in their own cardiology section, expired of complications accruing from a gunshot to the chest.

Someone once said life is all conjunctions, just one damn thing after another. But so much of it’s not connected. You’re sliding along, hit a bump and come down in a life you don’t recognize. Every day you head out a dozen different directions, become a dozen different people; some of them make it back home that night, others don’t.

When I came home from Dunbar’s, just after dark, Verne was there waiting.

Walsh and I had driven by the CircleCtop on Tchoupitoulas. The block was still choked with emergency vehicles and gawkers. Walsh decided to head back downtown, dropped me off on the way.

Happy hunting, I told him.

Verne sat in the front room in her slip with the lights off. Her dress was draped over the back of an easy chair. She’d poured a couple fingers of Scotch into a glass and sipped her way down to the first finger.

“Walking like an old man there, Lewis.”

I told her why.

“Not infected, are they?” She got up and walked toward me. “You really do need to start taking better care of yourself, have I mentioned that?” She reached up and put her arms around me. “Good to see you anyhow. Old, infected, whatever.”

“You do know how to flatter a man, Miss LaVerne.”

I always felt like I’d hit one of those bumps with LaVerne. Like I’d hit a lot of those bumps.

“I put some coffee on,” she said. “Or maybe you want a drink instead. Have you eaten?”

I didn’t say anything, just held on to her.

“I miss you so much when you’re away, Lew. Or when I am.”

I nuzzled her neck, kissed one bare shoulder.

“I always tell myself: this time he won’t be back. That’s the kind of thing women think, the kind of fears we live with. But it’s never that I’m afraid you’ve found someone else, stopped caring about me, wanting to be with me. What I’m afraid of, is that you’re dead somewhere.”

“Someday I will be.”

“And how long will it be before I even know it? How will I find out? I’ll just think you’re away again. Working. Business as usual.

“Women wait. That’s what we do, what we learn, what we become. No one else ever knows how much waiting can hurt.”

She climbed out of bed to grab a couple of beers.

“You matter to me, Lew,” she said, handing over a bottle. “That’s the thing.”

“I know.”

So I held her to keep her from the foggy, foggy dew.

Porgy you is my man.

Later she lit a cigarette and lay beside me smoking. This small red beacon there in the darkness. I listened to her breath go in, hold, come back out. Felt the bed move with it, move again with her arm.